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Game history repeats itself. North American gamers who rushed to buy Wii Fit, Nintendo’s new exercise game, are reporting damages and injuries that the company did not anticipate. Gamers are getting carried away with the stretching, aerobicizing and wobbling that the Wii Balance Board peripheral prescribes. Some enthusiastic gamers are flying off the board and crashing into potted plants and furniture, while other gamers have posted pictures of themselves smashing head-first into their expensive LCD teevee screens.

“We didn’t expect this amount of zeal from Wii Fit players,” says Yoshi Fakeymoto, Nintendo’s Vice President of Artificial Affairs. Nintendo experienced a similar issue with the release of its Wii console, first issuing sturdier straps for its Wii controllers, and later repackaging the controllers with soft sleeves to mitigate damages when the devices slipped from players’ hands.

The rubbery Wii controller sheath provides added protection

Fakeymoto-san says the company considered creating a leash to help tether people to the Wii Balance Board, but has instead opted to produce a full body-sized soft rubber sheath so that rambunctious Wii Fit players will cause fewer damages to themselves and their surroundings.

An online update to Wii Fit includes this pre-game warning

Nintendo is keeping mum about details of the product’s availability, but the company has released this video of its prototype Wii Fit body sheath:

Why, pray tell, would CBC not be able to fill this position? Let’s take a closer look at the posting. All they’re asking for is:

a computer science/engineering grad with

four years experience who knows

Actionscript 2, Actionscript 3 and OOP and is proficient in

Javascript

AJAX

JSON

XML

XHTML

Web Design

CSS

WC3 DOM

Photoshop, who also has

design ability and experience, and experience with

Windows

Unix

Apache

Tomcat

CVS, as well as content management systems like

Teamsite

Mediabin

Metatagger

Livesite, and a few

site documentation skills

If i was this person, i wouldn’t bother slogging through the doldrums of a 9 to 5 at the ‘Ceeb. i’d be melting supervillains with my heat-ray vision. The worldwide dearth of capable Flash developers puts places like the CBC (and Untold Entertainment, for that matter) into more of a “begging” than “choosing” position.

Shortly after forming Untold Entertainment Inc, i bowed out of my role as a Canadian video game journhalist, forfeiting perhaps the only benefit of the job: playing hot new titles before anyone else. That decision had me standing in line this morning at the Bay + Dundas SuprPrice in Toronto with the chubby, unwashed masses, hoping for my chance to pick up Nintendo’s hot new game, Wii Fit.

i dunno … those green letters are looking a little “generously kerned”, if you know what i mean …

Wii Fit, which ships with the startlingly heavy Wii Balance Board, did big numbers in Europe. i reasoned that since Canadians were basically Europeans with less armpit hair, i’d better hustle down to SuprPrice on Day One.

The Line-Up

SuprPrice shuffled the customers in their line-up by weight, reasoning that their heaviest customers were likely in dire need of the product. An overweight or obese person is more prone to heart disease and diabetes, which may shorten his lifespan. And dead people don’t buy DVDs. So there we were, fatties at the front, enduring the hours-long line-up.

The folks in the middle of the line were actually the best-placed people, because after the first hour of waiting while the SuprPrice sales associates tried to upsell customers on SuprPrice Points Cards and Extended Warranties, many of the morbidly obese people at the front of the line started dropping out, unable to stand unaided for more than a few minutes. Many of them were carted away on flatbed dollies, draped over empty HDTV boxes. The only exception was one gentleman, who had been transported to the store on a flatbed truck, having been carefully extracted from his home after his living room wall was knocked out with a wrecking ball. The SuprPrice people eschewed the store’s 1-per-customer rule for him, actually requiring him to purchase two balance boards – one for each huge, hammy foot – in order to guarantee the manufacturer’s 1-year warranty.

The Weight

When i finally reached the front of the line and puchased my copy, i was quite dismayed at the sheer weight of the product. Feeling like a sack of potatoes, the Wii Ballance Board strained the flimsy plastic bag handles and threatened to pull my stick-like arms out of their sockets. Expecting me, a feeble video game designer with a physique like Gollum’s, to carry this product home was like asking someone to run a marathon before he can purchase a treadmill, or to win a weiner-eating contest before he can order dinner. In fact, i would much rather that SuprPrice had me win a weiner-eating contest with a free cab chit as first prize so that i could make it home safely with my technological plunder.

Cuddly Nintendo mascot Shigeru Miyamoto holds a styrofoam replica of the Wii Balance Board – the actual product, if held aloft, would crush an average man’s spine.

The First Five Minutes

By the time i’d lugged Wii Fit home, i was a little tuckered out, so i plopped down on the couch with a chocolate milkshake and some microwavable Kraft Dinner + mayonnaise to get my strength back. After that, i felt a little sleepy, so i channel-surfed for a few hours before opening the Wii Fit box. And finally, the morning spent recuperating, i hooked up the game.

One of the keys to good game design is your reward system. A good game constantly rewards the player. It’s especially important to reward the player early in the experience; this is why many XBox 360 games unlock an achievement within the first five minutes of play. Wii Fit is no different: within the first five minutes of playing the game, i was informed that i had already lost four pounds. Bonus!

While creating my Wii Fit character, i rolled a 17 for upper body strength, which hardly reflects my actual physique, but i wasn’t about to tell the game that. i usually play wizards or mages with extremely high intelligence, but i chose the Athlete class this time, because i thought it might give me a Wii Fit advantage.

Deathmatch Mode

The most surprising thing about Wii Fit’s gameplay modes was Deathmatch, where you have to exercise the hardest in order to murder other players. i was doing alright on the treadmills, until MarioLover99 got his heartrate up over 170, and my Mii’s head exploded. i spawned on an exercise mat not too far away, and did a figure-4 hamstring stretch right through his chest. It was awesome. Surprisingly violent for a Nintendo offering, but i suppose you have to hook players any way you can.

Diet Guide

In addition to helping you get in shape, Wii Fit also makes suggestions about what you should be eating in order to attain a trim figure. i find this feature a little suspect, though – my first few times through the game, the Diet Guide kept popping up this ad:

i’m looking forward to making Wii Fit a lifestyle choice. The game tells me that if i stomp on 400 virtual Goombas a day, my appearance will be upgraded from “universally repellant” to “potentially sexy, given the right lighting conditions” by September 2009.

The third annual TOJam event wrapped late last night. This year, around 125 developers crammed into a scary warehouse at the edge of town to spend one weekend creating all kinds of video games about cheese. Cheese was this year’s theme. Some developers, like Shawn McGrath and myself were gung-ho to create non-cheese-related products (though for my part, my game contains poetry which is – at its core – terribly cheesy.)

Skilled shutterbug Brendan Lynch grabbed some great shots at the event. Click on the image of Yours Unruly to see the gallery.

Due to some project-related obligations, i wrote to the organizers on Friday and cancelled my participation, forfeiting my spot at the Jam. But fairy tales can come true, and by the end of the day, all the fires had been put out on the project. i packed an extra monitor into my knapsack and biked it down to a dodgy part of the city apparently dubbed “Corktown”, but better known by locals as “ugh.”

If you see this many dead-end streets and train tracks on Google Maps, don’t go.

Building Games in a Mafia Dumping Ground

When i rolled up to the derelict factory, it was immediately familiar. i had been there before, for a meeting with a pair of Facebook app developers called Refresh Partners. Back then, the place reminded me of the warehouse where Batman knocked Jack Napier (AKA the Joker) into a vat of acid. Apparently, scenes from Chicago were filmed there, as it offered that perfectly gritty bleak brick prison motif.

By luck of the draw, i had one of the better rented chairs in the building, because it had working wheels and armrests. Well – armrest, really, because one of the armrest cushions was missing. The chair owner had jury-rigged a new armrest by binding bunched-up bubble wrap to the chair with electrician’s tape. This assembly, as functional as it was, betrayed the danger of a hidden nail sticking straight up through the wrap. Thank God that my tetanus shots were up to date. i’m willing to suffer slings and arrows for my craft, but i draw the line at lockjaw.

We came and went via a back stairwell, which was home to a dead mouse and numerous other unmentionables that, fittingly, i won’t mention. The hundred-odd (and i do mean “odd”) participants were spread out between two rooms, one of which was stiflingly hot and the other which was freezing cold, thanks to windows that wouldn’t close. i was set up much better than most folks, some of whom were clustered around a shared folding table beneath a fluorescent lighting fixture that hanged precariously from one bolt.

Sleep When You’re Dead

After riding home for some sleep at 2:30 Friday morning, i stayed awake from Saturday morning at 9:30 to Sunday night at 11:00 PM, when the event ended. Being without my air mattress, which i found indispensable last year, i tried to take a nap while lying across three chairs lined end to end, but i was constantly awoken by the carpenter downstairs who spends his early mornings loudly slamming piles of wood together arhythmically. i troddled off to the hotbox room to snooze there, but that part of the building was emitting some strange beeping noise loud enough to keep me awake. At last, there came a vacancy on one of the dodgy couches in the nearby makeshift lounge, but by that time i was too tired to sleep.

That said, i was much more relaxed this year than last, although i think i stayed up the same number of hours. Compare and contrast this year’s photo from last year’s (also by Lynch):

Beware, Amish: spurning caffeine has its hazards

The key difference, i think, is that last year i was determined to prove myself. i wanted to show the world – and particularly my team supervisor – that locking me up writing game documentation for two years was a waste of my talents. To that end, i was dead-set on creating a finished, functional game if it killed me. And it nearly did.

My success this year started with my cancellation. i figured that having missed a day, there was no point in even showing up. With the pressure relieved, i was able to really take my time and tune into the game design process, without worrying so much about being perfect.

The Game

The game i chose to build was one from our internal game ideas wiki called Here Be Dragons. Here’s what the wiki entry looked like:

Sea Monster

It’s Like
That spider game in the junkyard where you pull the spider back like a slingshot to grab flies.

Overview
You’re a sea monster eating ships.

Not much to go on. The entry was in there just to remind me that i really wanted to make a sea monster game. Simple concepts make for simple games. Simplicity is crucial to turning out a finished title in a weekend.

The spider game i referenced was a great little Flash game i remember playing a few years back. You play a daddy long legs in a junkyard. You click and drag the spider’s body to jump up in the air and eat insects. The game was technically very impressive; the spider’s legs programmatically contoured to the shape of the terrain. The artwork was also quite nice. If anyone has a link to the game, please let me know!

i figured the same pull-back-and-release mechanic would be great in a sea monster game. Your monster waits at the bottom of the sea. Pull back and release to swim up breach the water. If there are any boats in your way, you eat them. Bonus points for eating one boat on the way up, and another boat on the way back down.

This all sounded good in my head until i actually started looking at pictures of sea monsters. Somehow, i had forgotten that they were all slinky and snake-like. A mathematical springy game mechanic is one thing, but add to that some chain physics, and suddenly the task seemed daunting. i’m no math wizard, and i never took trigonometry (though i’m aiming to fix this gaping hole in my understanding within the year).

i thought about the game for weeks leading up to TOJam, and eventually conceived of a game where the sea serpent is stationary and the boats move past it. All i’d need is a locked chain mechanic. This seemed a lot more reasonable.

Math for the Numerophobic

i started with an excellent Flash chain physics tutorial by Alejandro Quarto. His example contained all the trig i’d need to find the distances and angles between the sea monster’s neck segments.

i spent the first few hours of TOJam3 playing with Alejandro Quarto’s balls

In Alejandro’s example, the chain segments detect and prevent collision against each other. This was the first aspect i dropped, because it wasn’t important for my monster’s neck to collide with itself. Instantly, my chain moved much more smoothly. The trouble was that i needed a chain anchored to one point, but Alejandro’s chain was free-floating.

Here’s how Alejandro’s chain works: the last ball in the chain follows the mouse. As it’s being pulled around, all subsequent balls look for a larger-than-acceptable gap between themselves and the previous ball in the chain. If the gap is too large, a ball will tighten that gap by moving along the angle between itself and its companion ball. The gap that Alejandro set is the distance between the balls’ centrepoints, so you get a nice tight chain. (For the sea monster game, i tightened the chain even further so that the segments had more overlap.)

In order to affix the chain to one spot, i had to reverse Alejandro’s logic. First, i told the end segment to stay put. Then i told all subsequent segments to follow the mouse. Finally, i reinstated Alejandro’s logic to keep the each ball from straying too far from its parent segment. i kept the ball shape for the segments because circle segments look the most fluid when bent.

The end result is a really fantastic-looking and -feeling segmented sea monster neck. Thanks, Alejandro!

Programming in a Snap

Finishing off the rest of the game logic was a piece of cake. i made an early decision to angle the sea monster’s head as it followed the mouse, which players really reacted to. There was no magic to it:

i love it when graphics provide the illusion of technical prowess

i just chose a line down the middle of the sea monster, and chose a distance to either side. If the head was within that threshold, it showed its “forward” graphic. Otherwise, it showed its “left”- and “right”-facing graphics depending on which side of the threshhold it was on.

For the y axis, it was the same deal. When the head is within the middle threshhold, show the “straight” graphic. Otherwise, show the “up” or “down” graphic.

This provided the illusion of the sea monster looking around as its head follows the mouse. It’s not a technically brilliant scheme, but it is graphically labour-intensive, requiring nine pictures of the head (six actually, because the “left” pictures could be flipped for the “right” side). Then double that, because each head picture had to have a “mouthOpen” and “mouthClosed” state. Then add a few more pictures of the head with pursed lips for when the sea monster spits out the ship rigging. Finally, i lost the benefit of mirrored images when i added some shadows and highlights later.

Here are all the head images:

Attention, mermaids: he’s single

Gameplay Polish

The game was pretty well finished by Saturday night, and i had the rest of the weekend to add polish and to playtest. i had a few TOJam organizers sit down with Here Be Dragons. Jim thought the sea monster’s tongue was a laser, and so he didn’t grasp the fundamental game mechanic or goal. To fix this, i took his suggestion and changed the monster’s tongue from purple to pink. Then i added a chunk of code to depict the things the monster was eating being retracted into its mouth; until then, you’d tongue-lash items on the boat and they’d disappear, leaving a more laser-like impression.

Emily wondered why she had to click to spit stuff out. Then i started to wonder that too, and i took it out – now you just have to look up to spit. Both Emily and Jim didn’t understand why the sea monster could eat the mast, sailors and crow’s nest, but not the sails. So i created a rule where anything fleshy was edible, and anything not-fleshy had to be spit out. (One exception is the ship’s hull, which is implied to be full of delicious, crunchy sailors).

Originally, there was only one sailor pacing around the deck. Jim wanted a whole pile of things to eat, so i added a sailor in the crow’s nest, a sailor belowdecks, and a captain in the stern of the ship. Interestingly, most players focus only on the pacing sailor, even though he’s more difficult to catch. i think this is because he’s the only sailor with a sound cue – footsteps on wood. Testament to the power of sound.

Early play tests revealed that it wasn’t clear that the sea monster was spitting anything out, so i added animation of things being spat and landing in the distance. i animated this programmatically, which took much more time than it would to hand-animate it.

When i conceived of the game, i thought the passing ships would shoot harpoons at the sea monster, and that i would have a lives/death/game over system. i asked the other developers whether the challenge of filling the monster’s stomach with hard-to-snag sailors was enough, and they said “sure”. “No scoring?” “Nope.” “No timer?” “Nope.” i came to regret listening to those opinions.

Graphical Polish

i had the luxury of sprucing up my flat graphics with a few more gradients and highlights. Here are some comparison shots:

Ahh – much better

The Result

The Big Reveal on Sunday evening is always exciting. You have some teams kicking back, relaxing and adding the finishing sparkle to their title screens, while other teams frantically, desperately try to get their core game mechanic to function properly. It’s the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat everywhere you look. When you cruise around to different stations looking for games to try, it’s always a little sad when you find an abandoned station with nothing to show for a weekend’s worth of toiling.

As usual, there were a lot of games that were too complex for their own good. You’d roll up to a station, and the developer would be there, looking all nervous, unable to abandon his post because his game was too complicated for people to figure out on their own.

“Okay okay! So, you put your fingers on the WASD keys to control the movement of the black triangle. Move the mouse to kiss the zombies. Click the mouse button to increase the number of units on the screen, and shift-click to make a sandwich. If you need to drop your superbomb, step on the Rock Band drum pedal. And to look around the room, tape this Wii remote to your forehead.”

i was determined to let my game speak for itself, so i wandered away from my station and kept an eye on players from a distance. i did have to tweak the sailors’ deliciousness level for the demo, because it was taking too long for people to get to the end of the game. Players would abandon the game in the middle of a session, and the next person would sit down in the middle of the game and miss out on the silly poetry that bookended the experience.

In the end, the changes that came from that late-night playtesting served the game very well, but i should have added a scoring system. i implemented the “YOU ATE:” tally screen within the final hour, hoping that the “hulls eaten” tally would inspire people to go back and try to eat an entire ship (the most difficult task in the game), but no dice: there were just too many other games to play.

Tips for Future First-Time TOJammers

Designing a game to hold someone’s frenzied attention span in a room full of nerds n’ noise is slightly different from designing a game to captivate and engage the player across many hours and repeat visits.

i recommend a dead-simple control scheme. Mouse is preferable to keyboard, and single-clicking trumps click-and-drag. i’m already not a fan of clicking and dragging, especially for kids’ games, although all my kids teevee clients ask for it. Interestingly, in the two second timespan it takes for you to sit down to a game and then abandon it, all but one of the TOJam3 games that required clicking and dragging were too obtuse for me to figure out on my own, and i didn’t spend any time with them.

The one exception was Happy Goat Lucky, which used the pull-back-and-release spring mechanic that i had initially planned to use for Here Be Dragons.